Monthly Archives: October 2011

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Persevere Through The Pressure

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Under pressure from a variety of directions, things turned sour in my classroom one Thursday, leaving me flustered, frustrated, and visibly on edge.

Friday followed and turned out to be one of the best days I feel I’ve ever taught. What happened to turn things around in 16 hours?

On Thursday after school, I found my thoughts cycling between two natural responses, flight: “I feel like quitting”, and fight: “I will innovate”. Chatting with a colleague, we agreed that bad days or even bad mornings are often followed by good days or good afternoons once one has had a bit of time to decompress, regroup, and anticipate. Anticipation and innovation refine and focus our methodology.

Friday morning, after establishing clear directions and expectations, splitting the class into three ability groups for math, and spending more time one-on-one with struggling students more prone to act out or avoid work, Thursday’s dilemma was avoided on Friday. We practiced the afternoon closing routine on Friday morning so every student knew precisely what their role was in ensuring good closure to the day. The day was largely wonderful.

Teaching elementary is anything but elementary, dear Watson. Last year, I taught high school English and Social Studies. This year, I accepted a primary school position. It’s a big jump. Already I can sense my neural pathways developing in new ways as I am forced into innovation. Necessity is the mother of invention.

That Friday night, I attended an inspirational workshop with Dr. Lance Wallnau of the Lance Learning Group. Dr. Wallnau is a humorous, cogent, and inspired “think trainer”. He introduced many concepts possessing great power to change the way we think, act, and create. One of the biggest paradigm shifters was the “Convergence” concept. Wallnau explains that convergence is when your role meets with your giftings and talents and you experience fulfillment, so you acquire skills with speedy mastery, and you live with passion, developing and living your values because you do not sacrifice conscience for convenience, becoming authentic.

In other words, convergence is the vehicle for authentically doing what you were made to do – and loving it.

Understanding convergence, however, would not be complete without understanding what Wallnau calls “process events”. Many people give up on the process they are going through because they sacrifice long term growth for short term ease. They fail to appreciate the big picture and focus on the temporary discomfort they are experiencing in the growth season.

As this year of teaching unfolds, I will be going through a sustained process of learning how to fulfill my multifaceted role. It will be uncomfortable as I grapple with my current limitations and trial runs and prototypes, but the payoff potential is high. Experience pays great dividends when married with wisdom.

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Rethinking Canadian Elections

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In 2008, 940,000 voters supporting the Green Party sent no one to Parliament, setting a new historical record for the most votes cast for any party that gained no parliamentary representation. By comparison, 813,000 Conservative voters in Alberta alone were able to elect 27 MPs.

In the prairie provinces, Conservatives received about twice the vote of the Liberals and NDP, but took seven times as many seats. However, when it came to urban Conservatives, a quarter-million Conservative voters in Toronto elected no one, nor did Conservative voters in Montreal.

Finally, The NDP attracted 1.1 million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 50 seats, the NDP 37.

-Democracy Watch

It doesn’t add up

The discrepancy should set off alarm bells. In any business, the managers would be alerted and policies would change immediately. Yet Canadian politics has resisted change for a very long time. As a result, Canada’s outdated First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system of election caters to clustered pockets of support in ridings and completely ignores national trends. Canada is falling behind the rest of the democratic world in voter participation and representation by hanging on to a troubled system.

Our system currently allows a candidate to win with as little as 26% support in their riding. All they need is a few more votes than the next candidate. What’s more, it allows provincial parties like the Bloc to win twice as many seats as a national party like the NDP with half the votes: look at our previous election. The Bloc: 10% of national votes. That got them 50 seats. The NDP got 18% of national votes, but ended up with 37 seats. Our system is broken, and we need to fix it.

If no change takes place, everyone continues to lose more than necessary:

  • Parties lose through the hit-or-miss aspect of our electoral system.
  • Voters lose as huge numbers of ballots are cast meaninglessly.
  • Government is failed by an unfair allocation of representative seats.
  • Ultimately, Canada loses as a country that is already struggling with citizen participation.
Voter turnout continues to sink, yet people within the system continue to advocate the status quo rather than deal with systemic problems.

Voter turnout continues to sink, yet people within the system continue to advocate the status quo rather than deal with systemic problems.

Here are more actual Canadian statistics:
In the 2006 federal election, more than 650,000 Green Party votes across the country elected no MPs. Meanwhile, fewer than 500,000 Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada alone elected 20 MPs.

So, clearly, smaller parties lose the most, but it’s not just one party that loses. All Canadian political parties have incurred losses that are above and beyond what should be reasonably expected.

A better way

Speaking politically, is there a better way? Are there ways to represent more people more accurately? There certainly are. Many alternate systems are alive and well in most European democracies. Democratic nations around the world have sought a system that allocates votes in proper proportions. The idea is called Proportional Representation and it comes in various forms.

English: A geographic representation of the ty...

A geographic representation of the types of proportional voting systems used aroung the world at national level. (Wikipedia)

In Canada, Proportional Representation ideally means that Canadians across the country enjoy the best possible representation by making some adjustments. Ultimately, Proportional Representation aims to reflect national demographics more accurately, reflecting not only numbers more accurately, but accounting for aspects like gender or ethnic, urban and rural representation.

Expert views

Kimberley Earles and Tammy Findlay from York University argue that the current representation in both the House of Commons and the Senate fails to:

1. Reflect the diversity of the Canadian people (In 2003, Aboriginal peoples occupied 1 per cent of House of Commons seats, no Cabinet positions, and 6 per cent of Senate seats. People of colour occupied approximately 5 per cent of House seats and 7 per cent of Cabinet positions).
2. Reflect gender equality (In 2003, Women sat in only 21 per cent of House seats and 35 per cent of Senate seats). This decade, Canada ranked 36th in women’s representation in legislative assemblies.

Earles and Findlay demonstrate in their findings that Proportional Representation systems elect more women. The top five countries with most women in legislative assemblies all have Proportional Representation.

The Hon. Senator Lucie Pépin agrees that there has been little change in Canada:

“Eighty-six years after Agnes McPhail was [the first woman] elected to the House of Commons, women’s presence in Parliament has not changed significantly. Canadian women are a long way from carrying a significant weight on the political scene. According to the United Nations, the critical mass should be at least 30 per cent, but women’s representation in the House of Commons remains around 20 percent. After six successive federal elections, women still have not managed to break through this glass ceiling. Clearly, the current inaction will not solve this problem”

The United States and Canada are supposed to be global leaders in modern democracy, yet both use medieval systems. There are other systems of democratic government at work all over the world that are more democratic than today’s North American systems.

What are our options?

A. Single-Transferable Vote (STV)
In 2005, the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly proposed the BC-STV as an equitable voting system. It came within three percent of passing in 2005 and was offered again for referendum in 2009, failing once more, arguably because of gross misinformation.

Single-Transferable Vote (STV) is designed to reduce wasted votes by giving greater weight to multiple preferences. On an STV ballot, each voter ranks the candidates on the list in order of preference. A candidate must make a certain quota of votes to win.
An STV election proceeds like this:
1. Any candidate who has reached or exceeded the required quota is declared elected.
2. If not enough candidates have been elected, the count continues.
3. If a candidate has more votes than the quota, then their surplus is transferred to other candidates according to the next preference on each voter’s ballot.
4. If no one meets the quota, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are transferred.
This process repeats from step 1 until the required numbers of candidates have been elected . By allowing the voter to state their preferences, this system eliminates the hit-or-miss aspect of FPTP.

B. Mixed Member Proportional (MMP)
This system was proposed in Canada by the Ontario assembly.

MMP gives the voter one ballot with two votes.

  1. The voter casts one vote for a local candidate, and casts a second vote for any registered political party.
  2. Local candidates (one for each riding, as usual) are elected by the current “winner takes all” system.
  3. An amount of extra empty seats get filled in proportion to the second votes for the parties.
  4. These give the chance for popular parties to ‘top off’ their representation in the assembly according to the votes they get across the country.
  5. In practice, the MMP allows you to choose, for example, a Conservative candidate to represent your riding, and cast a vote towards a Green party seat.

Features of the MMP:

1. The system captures the broader preferences of citizens.
2. An individual vote is more decisive and more meaningful. MMP erases the need for the “do I vote with my head or with my heart?” question.
3. Parties that have general (eg. national) support but few elected representatives will gain a reasonable measure of influence.
4. The system allows for a more accurate representation of viewpoints.
5. There is opportunity for parties to work towards more proportional representation.

Ontario MPs, Senators, and over 150 university political science professors all agreed that the MMP system is more democratic and would better represent the diverse Ontario population than the current system. There was a lot of misinformation spread about MMP and thus the vote did not favour the MMP.

Conclusion

Pressure for reforming democracy in Canada comes from a variety of sources inside and outside of government. Each party ought to have a concern for democratic renewal in their platform. Regrettably, leading parties are least concerned. We wonder why more Canadians don’t participate, but when we see how meaninglessly broken our system is, we should be prompted to fix the root cause of our political despondency. With a more representative system, voters have more opportunities to re-engage the governance of the country and to have their voice heard. Is it so easy to forget that is the reason the system exists at all?

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Thoughts

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Burden of proof lies with the witness, but burden of belief lies with the hearer.

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Nothing is simple, but the truth is simplest.

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Two half-truths: one full lie.

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 Without love, peace is impossible. Love is possible when I hear the other’s story.

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Maslow’s Pyramid: I am always up for a challenge. There is always more to attain.

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Education for Today: Ecological Literacy

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What is education for?

When he wrote his article “What is Education For?” David Orr was ahead of his time (though I wish it didn’t have to be so). His prophetic call to the education system was to help retrain our way of thinking about how we use nature. Unfortunately, the issues he addressed still endanger us more than twenty years later.

David Orr’s writings are propelled by a deep concern for the collision course that human society and biodiversity are on. His response to the question “what is education for?” in today’s world, would be to design with Earth in mind and foster ecological literacy:

If today is a typical day on planet Earth . .  . Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: “It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.

…

What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, who says “All my means are sane, my motive and object mad.” In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.

Orr gets to the heart of what is happening in education and culture: Western societies are on the wrong path practically and educationally. The West perpetrates attractive illusions of mass comfort, pleasure, and well-being, doing so by recklessly and unsustainably destroying the productive potential of huge regions across the earth. Developing societies are eager to tread in the footsteps of the West. They are following an unstable example and, furthermore, are guided with a measure of coercion from bodies like the WTO and IMF.

We need to be ecologically literate. Proper ecological literacy educates away from subordinating, colonialist beliefs about nature.

Proper ecological literacy does not stop at small, partly token measures. Green widgets and recycling bins nevertheless continue to legitimise and excessive production and consumption. Greater reinvention is required to transform the human landscape before desensitization sets us in rigor mortis.

An age of information and denial

We are in an age of information, and yet we are more confused than ever about how to put information into practice, as though paralyzed. Health and comfort are the standards to attain, meanwhile the earth is more toxic than ever before.

Denial is a barricade in the way of ecological sensibility. Orr identifies six evidences of ecological denial:
1. Denying the limit of human wants and the use of our earth
2. Unreasonable standards of proof are demanded for the existence of impending or occurring environmental catastrophe
3. Unwarranted inferences are drawn from disconnected sources about scarcities
4. Ridicule and ad hominem attacks are used on figures who call for ecological sanity
5. Unresolved confusion over timelines and extents
6. Unwillingness of policy makers to face complex environmental issues

Learning environments

Orr calls us to examine the places where education takes place and the manner in which they prepare young people for the future.

Environments make a deep imprint on their inhabitants. Pause to ponder how some schools could be prisons without too drastic a transformation. The heating, lighting, and building materials are little different. Are we shocked at the amount of behavioural issues that result from our “education”?

The environment cannot speak for itself. Mindless doublespeak about our environments needs confronting. Naysayers to environmentally-sensitive economies disregard the history of innovation finding more efficient ways to do things, not to mention contemporary success stories in energy, transport, living space, permaculture, and more.

Change, or else

Finally, we must be open to change or we will trap and damage our children in destructive systems. We must rid ourselves of a nutritional economy that encourages obesity, a materials economy that fosters waste, toxicity, and apathy, and an entertainment economy that stifles profundity.

We must alter our social system that is bankrupt of alternatives to global environmental risks, reinvent our disconnected and sterilised education and a compartmentalised job market, and confront our cultural system that labels current conditions as anomalies rather than systemic results. We need to actually plan for well being. Believing means doing.

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Asking the Right Questions

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On Friday, a colleague made a very good point in discussion with Abbotsford Christian Secondary School during their workshop “Our Journey Towards Relevant and Engaging Learning” in Lynden, WA. We were talking about critical thinking and the importance of asking the right questions. “I don’t think we should just settle for the right questions”, she remarked. “Don’t you think we should be pushing students to find answers as well?”

It made me think. It was a good challenge, as over the past few years, I have become accustomed to people using phrases like, “I’d rather know the right questions”, in order not to sound presumptuous or preachy. It’s a hallmark of current philosophy. Many people go to university nowadays and I feel that many undergraduates are taught to question the world and rethink how everything works. We are given plenty of practice with tools of deconstruction and given very little guidance about how to rebuild. We graduate having thought lots and done little. If we sustain this as a way of life, we will live most of our lives in our heads insulating ourselves from our disappointment with a world whose brokenness we know in intricate detail.

Is it okay to look for the right questions? Absolutely. We often find great opportunity for innovation when we question the basic assumptions of why we do a thing. But seeking questions can become a closed circuit, defeating the purpose of asking questions in the first place.

Sometimes we forget that questions are meant to have answers. It seems like heresy to say so because the question has been given attention disproportionately, but it’s not. It’s actually the way things are meant to work.

This week in church I was challenged again by a group of travelling Ma’asai from Tanzania that seeking the right questions is not going to be enough, not when faced with real dilemmas of life and death. Their people need real answers. Certainly, having excellent questions may be of some value, but the tribe is faced with extinction from incursions on multiple fronts made by legal unfairness, HIV/AIDS, water shortage, and more. They need real, workable solutions.

It’s time for a reality check. If you’ve been satisfied with getting to the right questions, keep travelling down those paths and find some answers.

But first, you may need to embrace the fact that your answers may not be perfect.

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Major/Minor – Thrice

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Thrice shows itself to be a band that can go the distance in the ring. With each album, the punches gain force. From the beginning, Dustin Kensrue’s lyrics have been potent but Thrice’s latter releases reveal his true knockout force as he sings everything from marriage to media to morality in a sagacious drawl.

Major/Minor is a powerful album, but a lot of fans may not know what to do with it. Sonically, it’s a little confusing, revisiting a weirdly out-of-place grunge sound. Lyrically, though, it’s a heavyweight boxer. Hard-hitting “Yellow Belly” bookends the album with a grungy, gritty electric opener and offers an acoustic reprise to close. Careful listeners will catch allusion to the difficulty of confronting the hypocrite within as well as criticism of those who pray for rapture instead of confronting evils around them.

Kensrue uses his powerful parabolic style to narrate his own faith journey and challenges others to consideration. “Words in the Water” tells of the lifting of the law and “Listen Through Me” describes the crucifixion.

Major/Minor is unmistakeably Thrice, regardless of their frequent experimentation. This heavier, more minimally produced record is somewhat similar to Beggars and may please fans of Vheissu. Stickwork and guitar are grungy yet somehow pretty crisp, drawing together with the vocals into anthemic sound. As a band, Thrice continues doing what they want to do and paying little credence to the tastes of their fanbase. Love it or hate it, they are Do-It-Yourself poster boys, revolutionaries in a people-pleasing industry.

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Ghosts Upon The Earth – Gungor

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It is a show of confidence in their identity and the power of journey for Gungor to open doors to styles left untouched by the Christian establishment for decades. With the release of Ghosts Upon The Earth, which received more pre-orders than their distributor could expedite on schedule, Gungor delivers another phenomenal album replete with kingdom creativity.

Despite early albums the band was not completely satisfied with, their acclaim and the clarification of their identity since Beautiful Things seems to have removed any fear of rejection for experimenting. Michael Gungor (lead singer, guitarist) sees Beautiful Things as an album that everyone loved for its honesty but wanted to steer clear of producing a “Beautiful Things, Volume 2″ style record. Instead, his desire is the album will find its audience, rather than simply cater to an existing market.

The opening track metaphorically paints a fitting soundscape to celebrate the original creative action that brought forth the universe, ambling along minimally before bursting forth with explosions of syncopated sound. The second track, “Brother Moon” seems flavoured by Jonsi’s (of Sigur Ros) 2010 album Go; perhaps a nod to a fellow experimenter and serendipitous musical visionary. Another highlight is, “You Are The Beauty”, which segues through styles from bluegrass to jazz, keeping listeners on the edge of their seat the whole time.

With this album, Gungor continue on a mission to embrace their heritage of diverse and eclectic influences and redeem it just like they articulated in Beautiful Things. Their increased use of natural metaphor, weaves parables like “when death dies, all things live” that explicate their “liturgical post-rock”.